 Hello, my name's Jackie and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I'm an aspiring writer. If you're not new here, you'll know I've been struggling to fix my fantasy hot mess. So at the end of 2020, over the week of Christmas, I had a week off and thought I was going to try and write this book in a week. I tried, I got almost 30,000 words in, and I was expecting the draft to be 100,000 words, so I failed. Even more amusingly, I guess, is that on the weekends of the last two days of my challenge, I had a great idea for the midpoint of the book that I realized would mean I would need to throw out pretty much everything I'd already written. So, um, that it was a great week for thinking and epiphanies. It was not a great week for productive word count, though. So the following week, I thought, rather than just trying to push ahead with words, why don't I spend some more of this time thinking to see if I can unravel some of the issues I'm having. Again, if you're not new here, this might sound strange to you, because you'll know that I've been trying to use the anatomy of story by John Truby to figure out this book, and I spent a couple of months doing the exercises in the first few chapters on this book. What's interesting at this point is those exercises haven't actually helped me at all. I do still think there's value in thinking about the book in different ways, but I'm not using any of that now to try and figure out what I have. Instead, what I've been doing is focusing on the plot and the events I know I want to have happen and trying to figure out a way to put them together in a way that makes sense. And the reason I'm focused on the plot is because I feel like that's where all the problems are. Everything else, like the world, the characters, themes, and so on, they're solid. They exist in my head. They're fine. It's just executing them, and the way you execute them is through the story or the plot. So I was looking for simpler approaches, rather than ones where I might get lost for months at a time trying to figure it out. And I happened to be listening to Brandon Sanderson's writing lectures with BYU, I think. I'll put a link in the description below, because they're super helpful. And in his lecture on plot, one of the questions he got from the audience was, how do you organize like multiple plots when you have them? And he had a really simple approach, which is, in this storyline, I say what I want to have happen by the end of the book. So in my case, we've got two characters called Perry and Aubrey, who don't really like each other at the beginning, but it's going to be like a buddy love type of relationship. So clash at the beginning, but by the end, they're super close, really trust each other more than anyone else in the world. So he starts with what he wants to have happen at the end of that story, and then lists the key events that need to happen in order to get the characters from A to B. So in my case, I've got this buddy love story, we have their first meeting, we have both of them do something that rubs the other one the wrong way. So we've got, let's say, a scene where Aubrey does something that rubs Perry the wrong way, another scene where Perry does something that rubs Aubrey the wrong way, then they've got to start bonding. So we need a moment that generates trust or mutual respect and potentially one for each of them as well. And then by the end of the book, we've got the epic final battle scene where they save each other. And his example in the lecture was quite similar. It wasn't specific scenes, it was just, this is what needs to happen. So I thought this might be a good way to get all of the gunk out of my head and just focus on the really simple things that need to happen. So I had this buddy love story, and then I had, like, each of the major characters in the book and what was going to happen with them. So I went through this exercise and for each of the characters I had anywhere from, say, five to 10 different things that needed to happen. Then what Sanderson says is he has all of these next to each other and he tries to put them in some sort of order. And that's where I got stuck. So I created a spreadsheet and in each column I had each of the story lines. And I looked at them and sort of went, well, I don't really know where to put everything because I have no macro story guidelines. So I created a second tab and what I did in that tab was I listed the key events that I knew were happening in the macro story. So I used story engineering in the past to try and plot this book. Story engineering has key things that happen at key percentage points. And the biggest ones are 25%, 50%, 75%. And then, of course, where it begins and when it ends. So I had my event where it begins, my 25% event, my 50% event, my 75% event. And the good thing about each of those 25% markers is that the entire cast is present in all of them. So I thought this would make it easy to combine everything. So I created my second tab in the spreadsheet. I had six columns for the six different characters I was looking at. And then partway down the page, I merged the six columns and just had this 25% event, did the same thing at 50% and the same thing at 75%. So my thinking was all I need to do is figure out how to get each character to that point. And then I tried, but I didn't really get anywhere. Like I had these five to 10 events for everyone and I sort of knew which section in the book where they would happen. But when it came to like putting them in sequence, it just wasn't working. And I had six columns and I was getting overwhelmed. So clearly this method didn't work. And I actually think this has been one of my big problems with this book since the beginning because I have six point of view characters and just trying to organize them is a little bit difficult. And I have all of these scenes. And sometimes it feels like, yeah, not a lot is happening because we're jumping back and forth between them. Sometimes it feels like there are gaps or you know, there's stuff happening, but it's not cohesive, there's not forward momentum. So I haven't made things easy for myself. Anyway, I thought, well, what's an example of something from, you know, film or literature or TV that achieves what I want to achieve really well. And A Darker Shade of Magic by V. Schwab has always been one of my go-to's because it's very much in the style of the fantasy that I want to write. And I actually, back when I first thought about revisiting this book a couple of years ago, I created a big spreadsheet of this book where we have a column for each character and everything that happens and how she does everything. But because I've gone into so much detail and I've spent too much time thinking about that book, the big problem is that is just as overwhelming as my own book. So it's not really a helpful guide. So I thought, okay, let's find something new that I haven't done this with before. And I decided to look at Impostors, which I mentioned in my last video about this project for a completely different reason. Impostors is a TV series from, I don't know, 2017, 2016 maybe, which starts with a young couple who are completely in love. It's their 28-day anniversary and every day the husband gives his wife some new anniversary gift. So he has a 28-day anniversary gift and the next day we see him going out to get the 29th-day anniversary gift, which is a puppy. And he goes to buy the puppy and his card is declined. And he's like, oh, that's strange. So one card's declined, another one's declined. He's on the phone with the bank saying, look, I wouldn't have withdrawn all of this money. This makes no sense. He goes to the ATM, nothing in the bank account. Then he goes home. He can't find his wife anywhere. His wife has been kidnapped. And then on the fridge maybe or on a wall somewhere, she sees a message written which is the URL for a website. So he goes and types in the address of the website and there is a video of the woman he married saying she has left him, she's taken everything and he can't go looking for her. If he does go looking for her, she's found some dirt on his family that she will make public. So that's the setup. From here we have two parallel plots. One is from the point of view of Ezra, the husband who has left, and one is the point of view from Maddie, who's the con artist who stole all of his money. Ezra ends up finding another two of Maddie's ex-spouses and they decide to team up and try and track her down to get their money back and get some closure. So that's plot one, they're looking for Maddie. Plot two is Maddie and her fellow con artists who are planning to do a new con, so the exact same thing, Maddie will make this guy fall in love with her, marry her, and then take him for all his worth. So I really enjoyed this a couple of years ago when I first watched it, really enjoyed it again when I was watching it again last week, but the reason I wanted to watch it was because there are parallel plots and I wanted to see how someone else handled these parallel plots. So I was watching it and I had my notepad and I'd split it into two columns where in one column I would do all of Ezra's scenes and on the other column I would do all of Maddie's scenes. And what I noticed was that each of them had a complete plot, each of them told a complete story. If the show had have just been about Ezra trying to hunt down this woman and get his closure, it would have been a complete show. If the show had have just been about Maddie who had conned this guy and was on to her next con, it would have been a complete show. Might not have been as interesting because you wouldn't have had those two points of view, the plot wouldn't have been complex, there wouldn't have been these like divided loyalties where you've got these two teams of people who are technically against each other but you're sort of rooting for both of them. But it still would have been a complete story and what I realised was that in my book I didn't really have complete story for either of my point of view characters. I just had like a few scenes from each of their points of view until they met up around the 25% mark. So this inspired me to take an entirely new approach which I'm not sure of the wisdom in, I'm not sure of the wisdom of this approach but it's the only one I've got and that is to try and write this as a single point of view book at least for the first 25%. So what that means is Perry is one point of view character and I'm going to write her entire story from the beginning of the book until when she meets Aubrey as if she is the only character in this book, the only one we're following. Then once they've met I'm going to go back and do the story from Aubrey's point of view and everything that happens to him, his entire journey until he meets Perry. After that I might start merging them just because they are going to be together, they are going to be working together on things but I'm going to see how this first 25% goes and then see and what I figure is if this works then each of them will have a complete story and my only job is to figure out how to organise the scenes in the most compelling way rather than trying to do it all at once. That's thing one I'm considering, thing two is that as I mentioned last time I feel like I need to throw out everything I wrote the other week so my 30,000 words because originally the book started at one point which was the beginning of the international exhibit they were running and I decided to move the beginning of the international exhibit to the midpoint of the book and that means some of the stuff will stay the same but some of it won't. Another thing I decided to change was that originally the 25% point was the point when the MacGuffin went missing and I really liked the sequence of scenes and I want to keep some of it but one of the things I realised was that the book isn't really about the MacGuffin, the MacGuffin is the thing that gets things going but the book's really about trying to stop an uprising of mages, a magical revolution and if that is what the story is about then that should be the key turning point moment at 25% rather than the MacGuffin going missing so I thought okay well why don't I move the MacGuffin going missing scene to the very beginning of the book and have it almost like a prologue before the main story gets started and I think that could work. I have outlined the story from Perry's perspective as if that happened but there are things I really like about the old version, I mean in the old version she is the first one to steal the MacGuffin and then it gets stolen from her and even though that scene needs work I like the idea of it because it means she is more active rather than just having stuff going on around her. I also really like the scene when it gets stolen from her because there's sort of this, it's just very actiony, there's like this scuffle with Aubrey, he knocks her over by accident, the MacGuffin it's like an orb or crystal, I haven't got a name for it which is why I call it the MacGuffin but it rolls out of her bag across the floor, he realises what it is, he drags her back, she knocks him over and there's like this whole thing and they're pushing through all of these tourists here at the exhibit and then this young boy a pickpocket sees him on the ground and picks it up and disappears like he walks out the door and they can't find him and it's this awesome sequence where it's like no no no no you can see something going wrong and then she gets out and she's like oh my god what have I done how have I lost this and that won't have any place in the new version. The other thing that's a little bit challenging about the new version is that if Perry, so the MacGuffin, the orb is on top of the tallest building in the city so the tallest building is like across between the Capitol building and DC and St Paul's Cathedral so it's a white domed structure there is a statue on top of it with his hands up and in his hands he holds the orb, the stone, the crystal that I need to name. In the last version Perry climbed up there and stole it in the middle of the night using engineering tricks and then for the young boy to steal it all he needed to do was wait for her to drop her bag. Now if the young boy is the one who's originally stealing it I've got to think about how does he get it from the top of this building and if there's going to be a whole scene with him climbing the building or using some sort of trickery to get it like that turns into more than a prologue so all of that leaves me in the position where I have two potential beginnings for the book and I kind of like both of them so not only am I going to attempt to write at a minimum the first 25 percent of the book from two different point of views I'm also going to write the first 25 percent twice with a different plot I'm pretty sure from the 25 percent mark things will play out in the same way so I won't need to write two completely different books but I'm writing so one book with twice through from two different point of views with two beginnings so I'm not sure how many books that is but it's more than one and I'm doing this because I thought this would be easier than just trying to write the book like I did the other week so um that's how I'm now approaching my fantasy hot mess in the comments please let me know what kind of convoluted gymnastics you've used to try and get a book out of your head in an interesting compelling page turning way and um yeah I'd love it if you can find a way that beats mine because this um I do still think this is the best option but even I admit that it's a bit insane so um if you believe in me and have faith that I can achieve this please give me a thumbs up if you like this video also give me a thumbs up um hit the notification bell subscribe and I will see you next time bye